Thursday, April 8, 2010

I used the word “I” 158 times in this document, not counting that one. Man I am so self-centered.

Woah man. I just watched an entire episode of aqua teen hunger force. I didn’t laugh once. What is this thing on tv for. And yet like a sucker I sat through the entire thing. I was thinking about making this into a rant about tv, but I thought “naw, no one actually watches tv any more.” At least hardly anyone I know does. Which is good. Good for you guys. Tv is awful and terrible and just awful.

It’s kind of fascinating to me how very ocular we are as a species. We evolved this vision essentially to help us avoid running into branches and to see fruits from afar and we’ve taken it to the point where we’ve got devices that are pretty much standard in pretty much everything that show us all manner of abstract information. It’s totally fascinating to me and probably inevitable for a species like –

You know what they say “if there’s snow on the fields, plow it from both ends”

Sorry, still watching tv.

Anyway, a species like us.

Wow that was the weirdest show. Titan maximum or something. It was sort of like a high speed webcomic.

By the way have I mentioned that I love webcomics? They’re so great. They’re a visually appealing way to get a nice story and some good characterization across. And since they’re pretty much self-published, censorship is non-existent. Like for serious, ever since I found “kong: the gay barbarian” I have not needed porn.

Huh. “drinky crow and gabby” (or something) was pretty interesting. It’s basically just “draw blood, guts, use bizarre 3d cell shading techniques.” But it had some fascinating writing. The show was a snappy commentary on the purpose and concept of god and religion, delivered entirely too quickly. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t very funny, but it was contemplative.

Anyway webcomics. Yeah man. I read them. I spent the last couple of days being absurdly depressed and reading the entirety of shortpacked and finally getting around to reading questionable content. I am so full of weird transformers references and witty indie band quoting I’m ready to burst. Man. I love the character work on both of them. They’re interesting people. Genuinely fascinating and pretty well developed. No blank and obvious stereotypes here. That’s what you get when you (let your heart win) get your stories raw. The less middlemen in the way of art, the closer it can hit home. That’s cool. I love it when people do things just for the hell of it, not because it will sell. And the internet is totally the best platform for this. Space on the internet is essentially unlimited, as it can grow by exactly the amount your thing needs. On tv space is limited by literally time (if time were infinite would space be infinite too? Is this equation correct: t/∞+s/∞=2?) That’s neat.

Er, sorry, totally not focused here. In the newspaper you only have so many pages to print. In film, only so much money to spend on making them. In life itself, there is only so much room for so many foodstuffs and for so much housing. It’s a bit crazy that the internet destroys all that. Granted, the internet will run out when we run out of oil, just like everything else. But that will never happen. Not in my lifetime, anyway. Discussion for another time.

I don’t really understand the obsession with comedy, though it is entirely probable that I am just a cranky son of a bitch ((no, really) the bitch part, I mean) right around this hour of night. I like things, and I find some things very funny. For example the daily show earlier had on a muppet version of perennial whackjob micheal steele saying the outrageous things he says. It was fucking hilarious. Also steve carrel is much more likable when he isn’t acting. Also Colbert made a joke about the muslims and jews having to quit smoking and how that might make them a little edgy. I laughed absurdly hard. But comedy itself I just don’t really appreciate. Well, that’s not it. It’s comedy that adds something else. Or something else that adds comedy. Like, I dunno, that titan maximum cartoon. It was some sort of comedy/action mashup. And it entirely failed to amuse me. It’s like trying to have a serious moment in a dungeons and dragons game and having a dude start yelling “the eyes demand sacrifice” or “blood for the blood god.” It’s like trying to have a conversation with someone who bursts out in song every couple of minutes.

I dunno, maybe I am being grouchy. I like humor, I do. Some people seem to think I’m a reasonably witty guy (I SO am) and it really bugs me how often a joke I make in passing I hear told back to me a few dozen times as some sort of meme.

Speaking of memes –

Actually, look, if I say something that doesn’t make sense to you, please do me a favor and google it. You’re already here on the internet. google is literally in a box straight up the screen there. You have no excuses for not educating yourself about what I’m talking about. Google has rendered all oblique references opaque. You know the first time I read the word opaque was in an animorphs book when I was twelve. I remember looking it up later in an actual physical dictionary, rather than ignoring it and just assuming that the author was smarte—another discussion for later.

Speaking of memes, I hate them. You all have figured out by now that I browse 4chan, right. 4chan.org, once a haven for creepy japan-o-philes now a hipster hang out, because like, it’s so edgy dude. Seriously, it has totally lost the reputation it never deserved in the first place. And I don’t care, cause I’m a hipster who is so edgy. Anyway, memes come from 4chan, supposedly. It’s not actually true, memes come from all over the internet, but the entire internet eventually ends up on 4chan anyway. So they go there to breed, more or less. Like salmon. They’re awful, because they’re essentially a crutch for people who are incapable (it can’t be done!) of making jokes. They’re the hip and edgy equivalent of a 13 year old girl (or Amanda Frescas (:p (eh, who am I kidding, you’re not even reading this))) yelling “spork!” for no reason. It’s pretty uncool. I, with my superior wit, do not need such a crutch to generate spontaneous laughter. I simply do.

Fake superiority complex aside, my real superiority complex dictates that if you make a joke, don’t make it more than once (unless the opportunity comes up more than once and you’ve hit the point where making that joke again would invite a sense of recognition and camaderie rather than simple spite or boredom). Make a new joke every time. Because the world is made of jokes. So many jokes that there are two fake news shows on back to back more or less every night (I think) that do nothing but make fun of the same day’s news. It’s great.

I dunno, maybe I’m just really bugged by it because I hate hearing my own joke thrown back at me with no real addition in humor. Plus I hate to see jokes run ragged.

Hmm. I complain about a lot of things, I think. I’m not really doing it out of any legitimate resentment, but I think I’m discontent. And the only way to fix discontentment is to change something in yourself or your environment. This is part of that to be honest. I complain because I want to get my complaints down on something and I want to enunciate them and have them disputed or understood. I think I’m mistaking that (and I think a lot of people will probably mistake that) with complaining for the sake of complaining. I’m trying to make changes in my life. I’m working on this issue, because it’s a pressing one that bugs me with annoyingly suicidal thoughts from time to time. (note to people who care too much about me, please don’t take this as a sign for intervention. This is something that I need to do, otherwise I may as well have died.)

I just need my life to go somewhere. I was hoping college would help me do that, but so far college has sounded like high school, and I’ve largely treated it like I treated high school: by avoiding everyone around me because I am too damn scared to talk to them. I need to change this. I am already flailing about blindly through life. I need to flail harder. I need to learn to take risks. I need to learn to get up from a fall. Most importantly, I need to stop rejecting myself before I even feel rejected.

So I’ve decided to be gay.

I’ll make housecalls.

No, I’m kidding. Actually I will make housecalls. To play scrabble or something. Actually monopoly. I kick ass at collecting money from hapless tenants.

Ugh, now I’m trying to change the subject, because I am not really sure where to go from here. When I write, I write very seriously. Everything I put into a work that I write has some reason for being in it, mostly because I delete the stuff that shouldn’t be in it. I am hoping that when I am dead and my lesbian bondage fiasco novels have made me world famous, historians will look back on my early writing and write critical essays determining through divination just exactly how gay I was anyway. Nobody with any actual balls writes about his feelings. A lot of the time, I wish I were dumb. I wish that I could pick just one retarded hobby and stick with it. I wish I could just say “oh, hey, transformers, that’s my shtick” or “oh hey, guitars and various rock trivia” or “oh hey, I’m ridiculously flamboyantly queer” or “yeah, man, I love the shit out of recreational drugs.” It’s funny, because the typical response is something like “oh yeah well real people aren’t like that.” I beg to differ. Like for serious. People telegraph what their main interests are, and boy do they enjoy them. Me? I dress sorta-kinda hipsterish but I look kinda intimidating (all 150 pounds of me) and then I talk to people about videogames, then I turn around and discuss philosophy or fucking sci-fi novels, and then I go on about religion or current events, or then I start talking about 4chan or something. I dunno. I don’t have anything that defines me, really.

When I was thirteen, I really really wanted to be a video game developer. I even downloaded rm2k and had something of an epiphany as to how games actually work. Along with the epiphany was the realization that, shit, this shit is a lot of work. So then I decided I wanted to be a journalist at some point, because I really like reading the newspaper. Then I realized that I really enjoyed reading the newspaper much more than I enjoyed writing it. For a while, I wanted to be dead, because everything sucked. Now I kinda want to be a prophet, but I’m finding it really hard to convert people because I can’t fucking talk to them one on one. Like, seriously, I am the only person I know who gets shy and nervous when a waitress tries to make small talk. I am a shitty-ass prophet.

It probably doesn’t help that I spend so much time trying to get away from things or from people. I go outside walking wearing reflective dark sunglasses and huge, loud headphones so that I don’t need to see or hear anything when I walk around. I call my outdoorsy stuff my “sensory deprivation apparatus” because I am a huge dork. It’s really bad. It really worries me when I go about telling things to people over the internet that I don’t tell to people I actually know, based wholly on the assumption that people on the internet can hurt me less. Man, I’m messed up.

Maybe the problem is that I’m not embracing the right things. Maybe tv is a good thing, because it helps me avoid my problems like everything else. I have a pet theory that if I ever actually bother to get drunk, I’m going to end up an alcoholic, because it’s a vastly more efficient means of escape than lying in bed in the middle of the night and imagining I gain the ability to fly or being at home alone and doing silly stances and pretending I’m an earthbender (((toph is so hot) I don’t care that she’s twelve, she’s a fictional character) my name’s toph, which sounds like tough, which is what I am).

I read QC and stuff to live vicariously a life where people care about what I say or what I think about, and those people happen to be in the same apartment building as I am. Same with shortpacked. And it’s retarded. I’m trying to pretend to be someone I’m not without actually changing myself into that person. It’s like a super-lazy version of escapism.

I really hate it. I hate being smart enough to know that that won’t work. I wish I was autistic and could truly believe in the idea of having a virtual furry girlfriend who I photoshop into all of my photos, or believe that a licensed character re-color rip-off is actually my best friend. Instead I get to spend all my time sitting here thinking “gee, Jake, you got problems. You should, like, go fix them or something” and replying “eh, too lazy. I don’t know how to use photoshop anyway.”